High quality reprint of Love and the Soul Maker by Mary Hunter Austin.

I was raised in a city with one of the most beautiful and natural beaches. I was struck by the beauty of the ocean and the way its waves pushed and pulled along the shoreline, always departing but never failing to return. And I witnessed how every time the ocean withdrew from the shoreline, it left shells behind. It happened every single time. These shells could have originated from anywhere on the planet. But the ocean carried those shells to that particular place where we could pick them up. When we get broken, we keep trying without giving up, just as the ocean refuses to stop coming. Every failure teaches us some lessons. Every withdrawal leaves us with some blessings. We are never left empty-handed as we are getting our share of seashells. We collect the shells that are meant for us. When we start reaching for love from within and explore our inner potential, we bring our awareness into focus and discover our available abundance. When our attention is placed within ourselves, we do not need an outside source to make us happy, to make us heal, or to make us who we are meant to be.

Between 1908 and 1917, the American photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine (1874–1940) took some of the most memorable pictures of child workers ever made. Traveling around the United States while working for the National Child Labor Committee, he photographed children in textile mills, coal mines, and factories from Vermont and Massachusetts to Georgia, Tennessee, and Missouri. Using his camera as a tool of social activism, Hine had a major influence on the development of documentary photography. But many of his pictures transcend their original purpose. Concentrating on these photographs, Alexander Nemerov reveals the special eeriness of Hine's beautiful and disturbing work as never before. Richly illustrated, the book also includes arresting contemporary photographs by Jason Francisco of the places Hine documented. Soulmaker is a striking new meditation on Hine's photographs. It explores how Hine's children lived in time, even how they might continue to live for all time. Thinking about what the mill would be like after he was gone, after the children were gone, Hine intuited what lives and dies in the second a photograph is made. His photographs seek the beauty, fragility, and terror of moments on earth.

Marriage was historically not only a romantic ideal, but a tool of exploitation of women in many regards. Women were often considered commodities and marriage was far away from the romantic stereotypes people relate to it today. While marriages served as diplomatic tools or means of political legitimization in the past, the discourses about marital relationships changed and women expressed their demands more openly. Discourses about marriage in history and literature naturally became more and more heated, especially during the "long" 19th century, when marriages were contested by social reformers or political radicals, male and female alike. The present volume provides a discussion of the role of marriage and the discourses about in different chronological and geographical contexts and shows which arguments played an important role for the demand for more equality in martial relationships. It focuses on marriage discourses, may they have been legal or rather socio-political ones. In addition, the disputes about marriage in literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented to complement the historical debates.